Roggiano, Alfredo A.

Alfredo A. Roggiano was an Argentine poet and distinguished professor emeritus of Hispanic languages and literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. He was born in Chivilcoy, Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1919. Roggiano died on October 27, 1991 at his home in Pittsburgh, Pa. He was seventy-two years old. Roggiano's academic and professional career spanned close to five decades. He completed his doctorate in literatures in 1945 at the University of Buenos Aires and continued postdoctoral work in the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones in Madrid, Spain. He taught at the University of Tucuman, Argentina prior to emigrating to the United States. At the University of Tucuman he served as a professor of poetics and stylistics and director of the Hispanic section of the Department of Languages and Literatures. In 1955 in protest of the Peron regime, Roggiano left his native country for the states. Before joining the University of Pittsburgh faculty, he also taught at a number of universities including the University of New Mexico, the University of California at Berkeley, and Iowa State University. Since 1955 Roggiano had also been Director of the Revista Iberoamericana, a leading scholarly journal of Latin American literature founded in Mexico City in 1938. Roggiano accepted the directorship of the journal at the Congress of the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana celebrated at the University of California, Berkeley in 1955. That same year he was appointed Executive Director of the International Institute of Iberoamerican Literature at the age of 36. For his work with the journal, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1988. In 1963, Roggiano joined the University of Pittsburgh faculty. It was at this time that he also founded the Latin American literature program in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, retiring from that department in 1984. Over the course of his career, Roggiano authored numerous books and over seventy articles on Latin American literature. Through Roggiano's influence, the International Institute of Iberoamerican Literature has been housed at the University of Pittsburgh. Among its publications is the Revista Iberoamericana as well as a number of book series related to Iberoamerican literature including Biblioteca de América, Actas, Serie Críticas, Serie Nuevo Siglo, Serie Tres Rí́os, and Serie ACP. Prior to his death, Roggiano donated $150,000 to the University of Pittsburgh to establish an endowed lecture fund in his name in the Hispanic department. The Alfredo A. Roggiano Fund supported an annual lecture series, symposia, colloquia and resulting publications on various topics. In addition, the Alfredo A. Roggiano Prize was established and awarded annually to an outstanding graduate student in the Hispanic department. His death was preceded by the publication of Prision o Transparencia, a volume containing almost all the poetry he had written over his lifetime. The slim volume has been described as a metaphysical expression to transcend the author's soul and give of himself and his experiences a form of liberation from the prison of the self.

From the description of Alfredo A. Roggiano papers, 1938-1991. (University of Pittsburgh). WorldCat record id: 701907977